An Electronic Journal of Experimental LitHum Texts
| From
the editor:
Why should we read the “classics?” The question has been at the center of recent debates about Columbia’s core curriculum and its emphasis on the Western canon of literary texts. As I was teaching these works
– from Homer’s Illiad to Borges’
Ficciones
-- to my Literature
Humanities class, my students hinted at one possible answer to the controversial
question: We read – and re-read – the classics because they have an almost
magical power to spark ideas and raise questions. We spent hours debating
whether Odysseus was ethnocentric, Dante an unscrupulous photojournalist,
Faust a decadent dandy.
|
 |
||
| Above all, I was
surprised by the passion with which young people respond to these texts.
My students would always find a point in Herodotus or Sophocles, in Boccaccio
or Borges, which seemed surprisingly relevant for modern readers. Ovid,
someone observed, was really not that different from glossy magazines offering
love advice to teenagers; Montaigne, others intimated, would have much
to say about food, jocks, and tour groups on Columbia campus. A group of
Dante fans decided that New York had much in common with the topography
of the Inferno, as they show in a web project that includes texts
and photographs.
It was then that my students and I decided to create Quixotic: A Electronic Journal of LitHum Texts as a forum to share their work with others. The journal, of course, hints at a few reasons why we should read and re-read the classics. Ruben Gallo |
|||